- 16
Boris Mikhailovich Kustodiev
Estimate
1,200,000 - 1,800,000 GBP
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Description
- Boris Mikhailovich Kustodiev
- Bakhchisarai
- signed and dated 1917 l.l.
- oil on canvas
- 80.5 by 94cm, 31 3/4 by 37in.
Provenance
Collection of N.D.Andersen, Leningrad
Acquired by the grandfather of the present owner
Acquired by the grandfather of the present owner
Exhibited
St Petersburg, Mir Iskusstva, 1918, no.174
Leningrad, The State Russian Museum, Boris Mikhailovich Kustodiev, 1959, listed with dimensions and owner N.D.Andersen
Leningrad, The State Russian Museum, Boris Mikhailovich Kustodiev, 1959, listed with dimensions and owner N.D.Andersen
Literature
Exhibition catalogue Mir Iskusstva, St Petersburg, 1918, p.9, no.174
V.Voinov, Boris Kustodiev, Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1925, p.84 listed under works from 1917
Exhibition catalogue Boris Mikhailovich Kustodiev, Leningrad, 1959, p.37 listed under works from 1917
M.Etkind, Boris Mikhailovich Kustodiev, Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1960, p.197 listed under works from 1915, completed in 1917
M.Etkind, Boris Kustodiev, Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1982, p.168 listed under works from 1917
V.Voinov, Boris Kustodiev, Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1925, p.84 listed under works from 1917
Exhibition catalogue Boris Mikhailovich Kustodiev, Leningrad, 1959, p.37 listed under works from 1917
M.Etkind, Boris Mikhailovich Kustodiev, Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1960, p.197 listed under works from 1915, completed in 1917
M.Etkind, Boris Kustodiev, Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1982, p.168 listed under works from 1917
Condition
Structural Condition
The canvas is unlined and is securely attached to a keyed wooden stretcher. There are three old patches visible on the reverse, one in the upper left and two in the lower right as viewed from the reverse.
Paint Surface
The paint surface has an even varnish layer. There are some tiny fine lines of craquelure most notable within the right side of the sky. These appear entirely stable and are not visually distracting. Inspection under ultra-violet light shows two retouchings in the lower left of the composition which correspond to the patches on the reverse, a vertical line with associated horizontal lines in the upper right corresponding to the patch on the reverse and further scattered retouchings within the centre and upper left of the sky.
Summary
The painting would therefore appear to be in good and stable condition.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."
Catalogue Note
An exceptionally rare Crimean view dating from a pivotal year both for Kustodiev and his country, Bakhchisarai has remained in the same family for three generations. Last exhibited over 50 years ago, it has until now been known to contemporary scholars only from listings (fig.2) and by inference from the 1915 study, Fruit Seller, Bakhchisarai (fig.3) in the National Gallery of Armenia, Yerevan. It is without doubt the most impressive and exciting pre-revolutionary painting by Kustodiev to come to light in recent memory.
Kustodiev spent the second half of September 1915 in a sanatorium in Yalta on account of his health, during which time he is known to have made the journey inland to Bakhchisarai (see Etkind, 1982, p.429). From October until mid-November he moved to the coastal resort of Simeiz. He would return to Crimea in 1923, where he painted some oils at Gaspra including a view of Ai-Petri, but his impressions of the region are otherwise few.
The unusual Crimean subject matter alone makes this rediscovery a major addition to our understanding of Kustodiev’s work, but it is the dating which adds particular poignancy. In 1916 his tuberculosis took hold and paralysis set in, forcing the artist to spend much of the year in a clinic in St Petersburg, but against all expectations it is precisely at this point that one has the impression that ‘a coiled spring has been released and the full force of Kustodiev's creative energies are unleashed. It is now that he paints his best works… The irrepressible optimism of Kustodiev the artist increases in inverse proportion to the hopeless and tragic deterioration of Kustodiev the man’ (idem, p.21). Coiled spring or not, 1916-1917 did indeed see Kustodiev paint several masterpieces, including Maslenitsa (1916), Moscow Tavern (1916, fig.7), 22 February 1917 (fig.8) and Haymakers (1917).
His excursion to Bakhchisarai was among the last trips he made before being crippled by disease and confined frequently to hospital over the course of the next two years. It is not difficult to conceive of the contrast between his memories of the Tartar marketplace with the confines of a northern clinic in wartime. The gestation of the present composition took place over this long period of relative physical inactivity and imaginative ferment, and indeed, Etkind dates the present work ‘1915-1917’ in his 1960 monograph. A number of his major works from this period have corresponding pencil sketches or studies in tempera, as Kruglov notes: ‘scenes which he had in his mind’s eye and wanted to ‘capture’ for future use’ (V.Kruglov, Boris Kustodiev, 2007, p.109).
Kustodiev was born and raised in Astrakhan, a ‘noisy and multicultural city’ as Etkind writes ‘where the colour of Europe and Asia meet’; the lively exoticism of the South which is expressed so brilliantly in the present work arguably informs his entire oeuvre. In the artist’s own words ‘it is precisely the brightness and vivid nature of its colours which typifies life in Russia’ (Etkind, 1982, p.15). However Benois might object to ‘the barbaric clash of colour’ of Kustodiev’s early landmark work, Yarmarka, it is this clearly defined sense of ethnicity which defines Kustodiev’s work in contrast to the European yearnings of the Mir Iskusstniki or the urbanism of the Futurists. Brought up on the shores of the Caspian, Kustodiev's 1920 Russkie tipi series features a Tatar carpet seller (fig.5) and his conception of Russia clearly encompassed a broad spectrum.
The Crimea has captured the Russian artistic imagination from the late 18th century onwards, but Bakhchisarai itself is of course synonymous with Pushkin’s 1823 poem, The Fountain of Bahkchisarai. Evidence suggests the poet was an important figure for Kustodiev at this time. His charcoal portrait Alexander Pushkin on the Banks of the Neva (fig.4) dates from the same year as his visit to Bakhchisarai; in 1919 he would publish a series of illustrations to Pushkin’s poems, Dubrovskoy, Ruslan i Lyudmila and Skazka o Tsare Saltane and a number of elements in the present lot, for instance the covered women, recall the visual imagery of Pushkin’s poem.
In Bakhchisaria's streets roamed free
The Tartars' wives in garb befitting,
They like unprisoned shades were flitting
From house to house their friends to see,
And while the evening hours away
In harmless sports or converse gay
Crimea acted as a magnet for dozens of Kustodiev’s contemporaries during the 1910s and 1920s, including Korovin, Vinogradov and Konchalovsky among many others, but while Kustodiev's present depiction of the southern peninsula shares, or even surpasses, the colour and intensity of their ‘Gurzuf’ idiom, it diverges significantly in other respects. As Etkind notes, while Kustodiev spent most of his life in St Petersburg, he rarely painted it. His was the world of the imagination, and indeed all his paintings of Russian life including the present work, resemble fragments of a larger panorama. The motifs are transferrable, each village or market scene as it were, in conversation with his next (Etkind, 1982, pp.7-8), the stage set reassembled and relit for the next act in the great play describing rural Russia and its environs.
Watermelons and apples for example are a hallmark of his market scenes, and their positioning in the foreground of the present work anticipate his celebrated Merchant’s Wife at Tea (1918, fig.6). The elevated trays of food, the tea-drinkers, bread-makers and porters populate his landscapes from the Volga to Moscow; the horseman we find at the head of the crowd in Bolshevik (1920). Particularly characteristic in Bakhchisarai are the figures seated in the foreground with their backs to the viewer, a device Kustodiev uses again and again, perhaps to emphasise the theatricality of the scene and the sense of the curtain just raised.
The deep ultramarine and near fluorescent reds and oranges of the sunset find counterparts in a number of Kustodiev’s work of the period, in particular Moscow Tavern (fig.7) in which the brown furniture and the walls are set off by the boyars’ kaftans, as we see in the treatment of the clay-tiled roofs and blues houses in the offered lot.
Thematically and geographically, Bakhchisarai is some distance from 27 February 1917 (fig.8), but the sense of theatre, colour and excitement is comparable. It a letter to Luzhsky he describes the drama, excitement and even the joy that the Revolution brought to everyday life (see V.Kruglov, p.108). It is an awareness of the aftermath and Kustodiev's dreadful 1920 drawing of starvation in Petrograd for example, that lead us to treasure the masterpieces painted during the creative whirlwind of the late 1910s all the more. Bakhchisarai is foremost among them.
Kustodiev spent the second half of September 1915 in a sanatorium in Yalta on account of his health, during which time he is known to have made the journey inland to Bakhchisarai (see Etkind, 1982, p.429). From October until mid-November he moved to the coastal resort of Simeiz. He would return to Crimea in 1923, where he painted some oils at Gaspra including a view of Ai-Petri, but his impressions of the region are otherwise few.
The unusual Crimean subject matter alone makes this rediscovery a major addition to our understanding of Kustodiev’s work, but it is the dating which adds particular poignancy. In 1916 his tuberculosis took hold and paralysis set in, forcing the artist to spend much of the year in a clinic in St Petersburg, but against all expectations it is precisely at this point that one has the impression that ‘a coiled spring has been released and the full force of Kustodiev's creative energies are unleashed. It is now that he paints his best works… The irrepressible optimism of Kustodiev the artist increases in inverse proportion to the hopeless and tragic deterioration of Kustodiev the man’ (idem, p.21). Coiled spring or not, 1916-1917 did indeed see Kustodiev paint several masterpieces, including Maslenitsa (1916), Moscow Tavern (1916, fig.7), 22 February 1917 (fig.8) and Haymakers (1917).
His excursion to Bakhchisarai was among the last trips he made before being crippled by disease and confined frequently to hospital over the course of the next two years. It is not difficult to conceive of the contrast between his memories of the Tartar marketplace with the confines of a northern clinic in wartime. The gestation of the present composition took place over this long period of relative physical inactivity and imaginative ferment, and indeed, Etkind dates the present work ‘1915-1917’ in his 1960 monograph. A number of his major works from this period have corresponding pencil sketches or studies in tempera, as Kruglov notes: ‘scenes which he had in his mind’s eye and wanted to ‘capture’ for future use’ (V.Kruglov, Boris Kustodiev, 2007, p.109).
Kustodiev was born and raised in Astrakhan, a ‘noisy and multicultural city’ as Etkind writes ‘where the colour of Europe and Asia meet’; the lively exoticism of the South which is expressed so brilliantly in the present work arguably informs his entire oeuvre. In the artist’s own words ‘it is precisely the brightness and vivid nature of its colours which typifies life in Russia’ (Etkind, 1982, p.15). However Benois might object to ‘the barbaric clash of colour’ of Kustodiev’s early landmark work, Yarmarka, it is this clearly defined sense of ethnicity which defines Kustodiev’s work in contrast to the European yearnings of the Mir Iskusstniki or the urbanism of the Futurists. Brought up on the shores of the Caspian, Kustodiev's 1920 Russkie tipi series features a Tatar carpet seller (fig.5) and his conception of Russia clearly encompassed a broad spectrum.
The Crimea has captured the Russian artistic imagination from the late 18th century onwards, but Bakhchisarai itself is of course synonymous with Pushkin’s 1823 poem, The Fountain of Bahkchisarai. Evidence suggests the poet was an important figure for Kustodiev at this time. His charcoal portrait Alexander Pushkin on the Banks of the Neva (fig.4) dates from the same year as his visit to Bakhchisarai; in 1919 he would publish a series of illustrations to Pushkin’s poems, Dubrovskoy, Ruslan i Lyudmila and Skazka o Tsare Saltane and a number of elements in the present lot, for instance the covered women, recall the visual imagery of Pushkin’s poem.
In Bakhchisaria's streets roamed free
The Tartars' wives in garb befitting,
They like unprisoned shades were flitting
From house to house their friends to see,
And while the evening hours away
In harmless sports or converse gay
Crimea acted as a magnet for dozens of Kustodiev’s contemporaries during the 1910s and 1920s, including Korovin, Vinogradov and Konchalovsky among many others, but while Kustodiev's present depiction of the southern peninsula shares, or even surpasses, the colour and intensity of their ‘Gurzuf’ idiom, it diverges significantly in other respects. As Etkind notes, while Kustodiev spent most of his life in St Petersburg, he rarely painted it. His was the world of the imagination, and indeed all his paintings of Russian life including the present work, resemble fragments of a larger panorama. The motifs are transferrable, each village or market scene as it were, in conversation with his next (Etkind, 1982, pp.7-8), the stage set reassembled and relit for the next act in the great play describing rural Russia and its environs.
Watermelons and apples for example are a hallmark of his market scenes, and their positioning in the foreground of the present work anticipate his celebrated Merchant’s Wife at Tea (1918, fig.6). The elevated trays of food, the tea-drinkers, bread-makers and porters populate his landscapes from the Volga to Moscow; the horseman we find at the head of the crowd in Bolshevik (1920). Particularly characteristic in Bakhchisarai are the figures seated in the foreground with their backs to the viewer, a device Kustodiev uses again and again, perhaps to emphasise the theatricality of the scene and the sense of the curtain just raised.
The deep ultramarine and near fluorescent reds and oranges of the sunset find counterparts in a number of Kustodiev’s work of the period, in particular Moscow Tavern (fig.7) in which the brown furniture and the walls are set off by the boyars’ kaftans, as we see in the treatment of the clay-tiled roofs and blues houses in the offered lot.
Thematically and geographically, Bakhchisarai is some distance from 27 February 1917 (fig.8), but the sense of theatre, colour and excitement is comparable. It a letter to Luzhsky he describes the drama, excitement and even the joy that the Revolution brought to everyday life (see V.Kruglov, p.108). It is an awareness of the aftermath and Kustodiev's dreadful 1920 drawing of starvation in Petrograd for example, that lead us to treasure the masterpieces painted during the creative whirlwind of the late 1910s all the more. Bakhchisarai is foremost among them.